Sunday, 10 May 2020

Psychedelic compound from magic mushrooms produced in yeast

Bio-based
production of psilocybin has gained big interest and researchers have already
proved small-scale production in E. coli. However, production in bacteria comes
with a wide range of concerns which can be addressed by using yeast instead.

In
yeast, the scientists
prove
that psilocybin can be produced de novo, which means that you can produce the
molecule by simply growing the yeast with sugar and other nutrients, without
the need to add any other starting substrates.

Producing
psilocybin de novo in E. coli is difficult since a key enzyme in the
biosynthetic pathway doesn't work in bacteria, and so to get around this
problem you need to add an expensive starting substrate, making the whole production
process too costly.